Last month, the Taxpayers’ Alliance held a fringe meeting at the Tory Conference: this is comparable to a display of black ops at an arms’ sellers convention – truly the worst of the worst! The speaker, flanked by 2 sitting Tory MPs, actually said that it was good to attack the benefits of the over 65s because they would either be dead by the next Election or will have forgotten, and either way not likely to vote the Tories out! So, attack the nearly dead or growing dementured for repercussion-free cuts!!
This deeply cynical and immoral statement led me to think about the rising level of discrimination against the disabled, both official and social, that could allow any moderately sane human being to rely on death or memory loss to get away with an attack on the most vulnerable, and often poorest, in our society. Perhaps I credit the Tories with too much sanity, let alone humanity.
At its most raw, physical attacks against disabled people have been growing. “Disability Hate Crimes” are now a recognised category in Police files. They are a social reflection of a tory campaign to isolate and demonise the disabled as a burden on society. “Capitalism reduces workers to commodified hands and and brains. Workers are valued insofar as they are unimpaired and those who don’t fit the criterion of profitability are marginalised and seen as disposable.”1(Roddy Slorach). Further, “Those marginalised or excluded from production, either by accidents at work or already existing impairment, also become marginalised or excluded from wider society. In this way capitalism created disability as a particular form of social oppression”2.
In actual fact, most people do not fit easily into two neat categories of “disabled” and Non-Disabled”. Almost 50% of nominally disabled people, myself included, are in work. DWP Research (almost a contradiction in terms!) has indicated that half of those technically regarded as “disabled”, in the sense of having an impairment that significantly effects their daily life, do not regard themselves as such. In 2004, the number of impaired people in Britain was estimated as 10 million. A large majority of these are poor. The World Health Organisation estimates the global figure as 15%, or 1 billion people, and rising. Even in developed countries, disabled people are three times more likely to be denied healthcare and their employment rate is 44%, compared to an average of 75% for non-disabled. Globally, 20% of the world’s poorest people are disabled and the vast majority of the disabled live in low-income countries. This is a result both of the use of such countries as sites for proxy wars and the devastation of their healthcare programmes by structural adjustment of their economies. The latter is also known by the less generous term of ‘profiteering’. Bombs, land mines and drones all leave disability in their wake.
The roots of the current surge in “official” disability discrimination in Britain are planted firmly in the Tories’ attempts to dismember the Post WW2 social settlement. “The foundation of the NHS in particular was partly due to ruling class fears that the revolutionary surge which swept Europe after the !st WW might be repeated”. Indeed Quentin Hogg, later Lord Hailsham, said “if we do not give the people social reform, they will give us social revolution”!
The political elites now see no further use for such compromises, even though the average cost of a worker’s workplace adjustment is as little as £75. The low rate of unionisation and the pitiful level of strikes has made us seem weak. The attack has commenced with a restructuring of disability benefits which has directly lead to the withdrawal of benefits and subsequent deaths by suicide. The extent of this has only recently been forced out of the archives by a reluctant DWP. In July – August 2011, 1,100 claimants died after their ESA was restructured into the Work Related Activity Group.
According to Peter Beresford “The ultimate logic of government policy is a downward spiral of increasingly intolerable conditions for people with learning difficulties; the appalling abuse of Winterbourne View; for mental health service users, increasing medicalisation and reliance on drug regimes; and for older people, the neglect and insecurity that go with the inroads of private equity companies like Southern Cross”.
Labour governments have been as complicit in this as the Tories: one can on;y hope that a Corbyn-led Labour Party will start to elucidate a more humane and egalitarian policy. However, the growing tide of suicides and attacks does not allow us to just wait for 5 years. Organisations like DPAC (Disabled People Against the Cuts) and Black Triangle have emerged to fight disability discrimination. They must not be allowed to fight alone. The weakest in society are being used to trial attacks that will be applied to us all: we must fight in solidarity with oppressed groups, especially disabled people, to take their fight into the mainstream and make it everyone’s. We must not let the ruling class divide and weaken us to reduce our conditions to that of the 30s – the 1830s. For that a united fight against benefit cuts and austerity is required.
Tim Nicholls
1 – Roddy Slorach DISABILITY, AUSTERITY AND RESISTANCE
